Woke up to the sounds of construction outside our window (they were laying pipes under the street). Not great to be roused by “clang, bang, crash,” but it did the trick. Went to Middlebury Fitness, a serviceable gym, for an early morning workout.

A leisurely breakfast at the inn, then packed up and checked out. We debated taking a hike, but decided against the plan for reasons of both timing and the gathering storm clouds (more on that shortly). For one final morning activity, we drove back down to Murph’s little cottage on Lake Dunmore for a brief farewell-to-Vermont swim. The water was colder than anything we’ve been in thus far (with the exception of the icy bottom layer of J’s friends’ pond), but still wonderful, and I had a lot of fun on the diving platform. I think I should’ve been born a fish — or a sea otter, or a loon.

At about noon, we began the long drive from central Vermont to the Rhode Island coast. The beginning of the drive was uneventful, even enjoyable: back roads through the Green Mountain National Forest, past meandering farmland and blink-of-an-eye villages. We stopped for a not-memorable lunch of fish & chips at Trozier’s in Bethel, VT.

Then came the rain. It started somewhere around Putney (Vermont), and it didn’t stop until we crossed the Bristol (Rhode Island) town line. If there were 87 words for rain in the English language, we went through all of them: hard rain, soft rain, blinding rain, drizzling rain, pelting rain, misty rain, foggy rain, driving rain, sideways rain, thunderstorm rain, flooding rain, giant-puddles-in-the-road rain, rivers-in-the-median rain, slow-down-to-40-mph-because-no-one-can-see rain, white-knuckles rain, “how is it this dark at 5pm in midsummer?” rain, “Tina, could you slow down?” rain, “wow, I can’t believe anyone would tailgate me right now” rain, rain with lightning, rain with hail (we missed the biggest hailstones, which lay like snow by the side of I-90 in central Massachusetts), rain with a full rainbow, rain with cloudy half-rainbows, rain with a faint double rainbow.

Amazingly, we stayed pretty dry through all of it. That’s mostly because it took us a really long time to drive south, so we were in the car for the entire impressive storm. We did stop for dinner in Providence (had reasonably good Cambodian food at Angkor), but by then the rain had mostly slowed to a drizzle.

Arrived at Bristol not long ago. Opened up the house without incident (Prescott just had to do something scary with the fuses). It’s great to be here — very peaceful and quiet. And the departing rain did make for a beautiful sunset!